The Trinity
On perception, presence, and the quiet self beyond story
“The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”
— Meister Eckhart
I was reading the 20th edition of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when something struck me.
Robert Pirsig reflects on the nature of first-person narrative and how it traps the reader inside the narrator’s perspective.
He admits that the protagonist isn’t always someone you’d like, but because you’re inside his mind, you rarely question him—
until it’s too late, or never at all.
I’m the reader of my own mind, too.
There’s a narrator in me—telling the story of my life, explaining why things happened,
spinning meaning and identity out of memories.
But I’m also the reader—
receiving that story, sometimes believing it completely,
other times stepping back and wondering, “Wait… is this true?”
And more than that—
I’m the creator of the stories being told.
And then… there’s someone else.
The observer.
The part of me that sees the reader, the narrator, and even the creator.
The part that watches the whole story unfold,
without clinging to any of it.
When I brought this up in a conversation with ChatGPT, it helped me shape what I was sensing.
We started naming these inner roles:
- The Narrator – the ego’s voice, shaped by conditioning, fear, memory, and desire.
The self that lives the plot. - The Reader – the reflective mind that interprets, questions, and seeks meaning:
“Why do I feel this? What does this mean?” - The Observer – silent, spacious, unentangled.
It watches the roles play out without fixing or judging. It simply is.
This mapping helped me understand something I’ve been circling for a long time:
that I can live from different places within myself.
And that the work I’ve been doing—
spiritually, psychologically, emotionally—
isn’t just about “healing” or “becoming.”
It’s about shifting vantage points with awareness.
Training the inner reader not to be swallowed by the narrator.
Learning to live more often from the observer’s quiet field.
It’s what Jung might call individuation—
but with a twist.
Because I’m not only trying to integrate unconscious material;
I’m trying to see the structure of perception itself.
I’m not just asking, “Who am I?”
I’m asking, “From which part of me is that question arising?”
And here’s the humbling part:
Even the observer isn’t the final truth.
Even the one who sees is still someone,
still inside a frame.
In nondual teachings—
Advaita Vedānta, Dzogchen, Zen—
they speak of dissolving the entire triad:
subject, object, and the act of observing.
Not just witnessing reality,
but going beyond any point of view.
Beyond even being a witness.
Sometimes, I taste that.
Other times, I cling to meaning like it’s a life raft.
Recently, during meditation, I hit a void.
No feeling. No story. Just... nothingness.
When I tried to summon love, even that felt like an idea.
Not a lived experience.
My ego wanted to make sense of it, to turn it into something I could hold.
But for a moment, I just floated in the absence.
It unsettled me.
But I knew—I know—this is part of the spiritual path.
The void doesn’t always feel like peace.
Sometimes, it’s just empty.
And that’s what makes it so unfamiliar.
I thought of Seth. And it helped.
Not because he was the answer—
but because the love I felt for him
brought color back into nothingness .
It reminded me that feeling is real,
and worth staying for.
I’ve used my intellect as a shield in the past—
a clever and convincing way to avoid feeling too much.
I see that now.
And I also see that I need to titrate feeling, as Peter Levine suggests.
Let it come in waves I can hold.
Otherwise, it floods me.
But here’s the miracle:
I can reflect on how I think.
I can shift the way I interpret my experience.
I can reauthor—
not just the story,
but the way I tell it.
That, to me, is the most beautiful part of being human.
We can notice.
We can shift.
We can wake up inside the story—
and walk our way out of it,
one breath at a time.